The original conversion rate in AD&D was 200 copper = 1 gold piece. According to the original Dungeon Masters Guide, the average person made like 500 copper a year. My 500,000 gold pieces I had sitting in the grand and fabulous treasure vaults of Misercord Keep were worth 100,000,000 copper pieces. That worked out to a year wage for 200,000 people.1 Eventually we got high enough and powerful enough in levels that each character ruled over a small realm. Not big, mind you. Mine had about 10,000 people.
I reasoned given the vast amounts of gold I had in my keep, I could raise the average wage of each citizen from 500 copper to 5,000 copper a year (imagine your wage going up 10 times over night). That was a yearly expenditure of 250,000 gold pieces. If I never set off adventuring again and no dragons attacked, I could keep this wage going for two years, just paying out of my treasure room. My people would love it and love me. I would go down in history as the greatest, most beloved sovereign of the Second Lesser Continent of Zantoria. And if the Bank of Lord Misercord of the Umbarian Warrior Guild ever got a bit low, I'd could set off adventuring, slay a few dragons and liches and keep my beloved people in copper for a long long time. Wouldn't that be great if we could hand Henry Paulson a +2 short sword and a buckler and point him in the direction of the nearest fire giant castle to come up with the $700 billion he needs?
[caption id="attachment_414" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="No one may enter the fabulous treasure vaults of Misercord Keep unless they can get past the demon pig!"]
[/caption]My Dungeon Master, as all good DMs go, wasn't going to just let me get away with this. Over night, a loaf of bread went from 1 copper to 100 coppers. My citizenry, initially ecstatic about their new princely wages, were now on the verge of revolt, suddenly having to pay so much more for basic food stuffs. Alright, this was easily solved by bringing down price controls on basic goods. The DM noted the local merchants merely laughed at my pitiful law, preferring to risk a small fine over the certainty of large profits on bread. Being Chaotic Neutral, this was easily solved by me hiring a small army of goons to patrol markets and summarily execute, via public torture, any merchant in violation of my wage and price controls.
Well, that brought prices under control very quickly. But then it certainly did cast a small downer on what had been, for a brief moment, a rather shiny happy place to live. Joe the Butcher might be over charging you for salted umber hulk but at the end of the day you don't want to see him swinging from his own meat hooks, crying out for one or more Melnibonéan deities to save him.
I reasoned a short period of draconian rule would bring people in line. And it did. But then my DM mentioned something funny was happening in the markets of the Grand High Duchy of Misercordia. Not only had merchants stopped selling bread, mead, and salted umber hulk at ridiculously high prices but they largely stopped selling these things altogether. My DM noted the market stalls that once sold food stuffs had now been taken over by merchants selling swords, fur coats, gold-plated trebuchets, kobold skin handbags, and Hyborian slave girls, all of which commanded super high prices. Since none of this stuff was a basic need, as defined by my wage and death by torture controls, many merchants stopped selling controlled goods and started selling stuff they could make high profits on. No problem. I then extended my wage and torture controls to everything in my Grand Duchy.
That worked for a bit. But then my DM told me another funny thing started to happen in the markets of the Grand High Duchy of Misercordia. The variety nearly vanished. It appeared merchants couldn't easily follow my extensive lists of products and prices. Some were being dragged off to their deaths by my goon squad claiming they had not received the most recent list. Others feared bringing new and improved products onto the market because they didn't know how to price them. High leather boots they understood had a controlled price of 15 silver pieces but high green felt boots were now the rage all across the Second Lesser Continent of Zantoria, except for my duchy. No merchant had any idea what the legal maximum price was for this new fashion trend and instead of risking being over priced on an item and getting impaled, flayed, or thrown to a pit of shambling mounds, they preferred to merely carry a small handful of products they well understood the price for.
My people were largely not happy and increasingly unfashionably dressed. Yes, their favorite butcher was no longer being thrown into the gaping mouth of a purple worm by my goons from a flying carpet, but then it now became very hard to buy almost anything and what they could buy wasn't very exciting. Fine. I hired the services of a small army of clerics and had them casting Make Food spells day and night. These food basics were distributed for free and price controls came off everything else.
As it turned out, it took time to distribute this stuff and it wasn't always getting to certain groups particularly fresh. The attitude of the people doing the distribution was "well, if you don't like it, I'm happy to give you a refund!" Some of the goons doing the delivery figured out a way to line their pockets by charging people a premium to get the food first and freshest. The goods that were no longer under price controls got even more expensive. First with all the free food about, food budgets could be spent on other stuff. And things had gone so badly for such a long time now and market conditions were so unpredictable, waiting for the whim of my player character, that merchants now were just interested in making some quick high priced sales, collecting their riches, and then moving to one of the surrounding kingdoms where a copper was still worth a copper. The exodus of citizens, initially a trickle, started to become a river. These people started spilling over into neighboring kingdoms, buying up property, driving up prices, and since they were so unfashionably dressed they were generally an eyesore.
When the neighboring kingdoms got wind of what I was doing in the Grand High Duchy of Misercordia and fearing future chaos, they banded together, raised an army and marched on my kingdom.
And that was it.
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1 Bill Gates, as of March 6, 2008, was worth $58 billion. The average American household grosses $48,000. Bill Gates could support a bit more than 1.2 million households for a single year if he liquidated his holdings.
-- Karl Mamer
You had a great DM!
ReplyDeleteOdd that even though you had neighbors who could invade you that there were no neighbors with which your peasants could trade hard currency for food: shouldn't competition between enterprising merchants "magically" lower bread prices? Relieved of the necessity for subsistence farming, some of your local population of peasants might have been free to gain levels themselves, perform thaumatergical research, and raise overall standards of living though wider availability of magic.
ReplyDeleteA very excellent point arrosen. I think he was just looking for an excuse to kill off my PC :)
ReplyDelete